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Division Spotlight
Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
Improving task performance, system reliability, system and personnel safety, efficiency, and effectiveness are the division's main objectives. Its major areas of interest include task design, procedures, training, instrument and control layout and placement, stress control, anthropometrics, psychological input, and motivation.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
Sung Jin Lee, Chan Y. Paik, Robert E. Henry, Michael Epstein, Martin G. Plys
Nuclear Technology | Volume 125 | Number 2 | February 1999 | Pages 182-196
Technical Paper | Reactor Safety | doi.org/10.13182/NT99-A2941
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Modular Accident Analysis Program Version 4 (MAAP4) is an integrated severe accident analysis code that integrates a large number of phenomena and models into a single plant simulation. MAAP4 was used to predict the containment response to a simulated small-break loss-of-coolant accident steam blowdown followed by the release of a hydrogen/helium gas mixture (test E11.2) in the decommissioned German Heiss Dampf Reaktor facility. The test also incorporated external spray cooling of the steel dome near the end of the transient. In MAAP4, 29 nodes and 44 flow junctions were used to model the highly compartmentalized containment. The MAAP4 prediction of the containment pressure and gas temperature over the duration of the transient and the transient distribution of hydrogen/helium in the containment compartments are compared with experimental results. MAAP4 overpredicts the pressure and correctly predicts the thermal and hydrogen stratification that was observed in the E11.2 test.